To What Extent Do Audiences Use Media To Construct Their Own Sense Of Collective Identity?

“Identity is complicated” said David Gauntlett. There has been a dramatic change in the media in recent years including the Internet and how youths have utilised this to construct their identity. By considering Gauntlett's theory, we can see how youths have developed their identities.

In the early stages of life Lacan’s concept said that by the age of 6 months, we recognise ourselves in the mirror and Wallon said that it helps us get a sense of self-identity. However, Tallis critiqued this by saying that “blind indiv­iduals would lack selfhood and be unable to enter language, society or the world at large”.

There are many ways in which youths can develop their collective identities, one of which is through social networking websites, such as Facebook and Twitter. With the ability to share information, pictures and update statuses, youths tend to use these features to begin to develop their collective identities. As Henri Jenkins said, teens are constantly updating and customising their profiles online to construct and experiment with their identities. Using these social networking sites also gives us a sense of belonging as Merlau Ponty said, we have an embodied experience when we create something using our hands (i.e. a Facebook profile) and we like it when other people interact with our profiles because it creates a sense of belonging for us and helps to construct our collective identities.

Facebook and Twitter are part of the Web 2.0, along with Youtube and other websites that are considered ‘user-centred information sharing sites’, are classed as Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 is the shift from simply receiving information to creating and sharing information. This has been used by youths as a form of rebellion against the regulated society created by the media and generally older people. Regulators cannot censor constantly updating websites such as Facebook or Youtube so youths use this to their advantage, to spread their opinions. The Web 2.0 has clearly evolved and we can see this by looking at the comparison between the Brixton Riots 1981 and the London 2011 Riots.

The London 2011 Riots were planned over social networking sites and Blackberry Messenger. The rioters used these tools to communicate with each other and even posted statuses and pictures of themselves with stolen goods as a ‘trophy’. The communication between rioters in London was much quicker which made it harder for regulators to stop them. Twitter was even asked to be shut down because it was being used as a catalyst to plan riots and Blackberry Messenger was taken down for a few days. These things were not around when the Brixton riots happened so it was harder for youths to riot in massive groups.

After the London 2011 Riots, tabloids generated moral panic which created a sense of fear around youths and readers adopted this biased opinion. However, it wasn’t just teenagers alone rioting and looting, but also some adults. This already negative view of youths had now been reinforced to the public because of the London 2011 Riots, and inevitably, the tabloids. By persuading people to believe that youths, as one big collective identity, were destructive, the print media had thus contributed to postmodernism and constructed our reality. They have done this by blurring the boundaries between reality and representation. These are the negative aspects of being in a collective identity; you are grouped into things automatically, just like all youths were grouped in with, and associated with rioting and violent behaviour. As Michael Foucault said, being in a collective identity introduces the creation of stereotypes, and once you are stereotyped, it’s hard to be seen differently from then on.

Many youths cannot find their identity so easily and may depend on celebrities, new trends and magazines to create their own. When youths attempt to find their identity within another source, they tend to think that what they see is a perfect representation of that particular trend or ‘look’. Winship’s notion of complexity is about being prepared, in terms of audience gratification, to finally recognise the ideal version of ourselves. By doing this, a constructed audience is ‘made’. So when youths are represented with a picture of a celebrity on the front of a fashion magazine, they are more likely to believe that what they see is the ideal ‘look’. Youth looking for their identity can often follow fashion trends which may lead them to become part of a sub-culture, like being ‘Emo’. An article published in The Sun (08 May 2008) explained that a young teenager was obsessed with the Emo band ‘My Chemical Romance’ and eventually hung herself. In this way, some youths take the media to construct, not just their identity, but their lives.

All youths construct their identities differently by choosing what they think to be fit for themselves in terms of media texts. As Stuart Halls encoding and decoding model shows, media texts are written with encoded messages and we decode it in the way we feel is most suitable to us. During the London 2011 Riots, many people will read the tabloids articles and decode the messages within the texts to side against the youths because of their history of negativity. Alternatively, youths will read the same articles and decode the messages within the texts to argue against stories being written. This is supported by The Women In Journalism (WiJ), who wrote an article called ‘Hoodies or Altar Boys’. This showed that 85% of teen boys said that newspapers portrayed them in a bad light and that only 24% of stories about teen boys were positive and 16% of that was within entertainment.

To conclude, audiences, mainly youths, use media to a great extent to form their collective identities and then develop it even further by using the Web 2.0. Although, with such different views on collective identities, it’s hard for youth to construct their identities using media because of the media has such diverse views on everything. This is what makes identity complicated as David Gauntlett said. We are in a world where reality is built by the powerful force of the media, only to be given an ideology which resembles Karl Marx’s theory of Marxism in society. If the media have us all believe the same thing then there is no democracy within the social order. While youths may stand up to the portrayals of the media, the fact that we look to the media to form our identities just goes to show that we let the media run our lives and construct our reality. It’s possible that a future outcome will see youth construct their identities entirely on the Web 2.0 to further rebel against the Marxist ideologies of the mass media.